Rickshaw Dispatch Service in India (Spring 2012)

The Rickshaw Dispatch Service is a project of the Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship (ADE) program, a collaboration between Babson and Olin Colleges in Boston, MA, to combine business and technical innovations to address the needs of those living in poverty. ADE works with local partners in underserved communities to develop solutions which are sustainable by those communities. ADE operates in Morocco, Ghana, Alabama, and India. I participated in the India team, primarily on the Rickshaw Dispatch Service project. If you are interested in the work and experiences of the ADE India team, please visit our blog.

A group of cycle rickshaw pullers waiting at an informal congregation point for customers.

The Goal

Cycle rickshaw pullers in urban India endure hard manual labor for long hours. Many of them left rural farming to find work in the city, only to be caught in a destructive cycle of poverty. We wanted to lift these rickshaw pullers out of the cycle of poverty by empowering them to provide higher-value services to rickshaw customers. In particular, we focused on pullers in Guwahati, Assam, India, with the broader goal of scaling the solution across India.

The Process

In order to implement a solution which improves the lives of rickshaw pullers, we must first understand their lives. After careful study, we identified an opportunity for value-creation: the processes through which the rickshaw puller and rickshaw customer find each other are often inefficient, causing both to waste time and effort.

The Solution

A successful solution to this problem must consider the resource constraints of the target audience. We chose to use cheap, pervasive cell phone technology to connect rickshaw customers to the nearest rickshaw puller using geolocation technology. This required working with a large telecommunications company in order to perform cell tower triangulation, a relationship which presented unique challenges. By working with local partners in Guwahati from a distance and on-site, we were able to make significant progress towards implementing an appropriate, sustainable solution.

My Responsibilities

Technical development and research

Stakeholder communication

User-oriented design

Team organization, documentation, and logistics

Graphic design and presentation

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